musings from a hyperactive mind..

Since I don't have a website anymore, here's a story I wrote. Suggestions for how to fix it are very welcome.

The motel room was very bland. Its walls were cream and had obviously not been repainted in years. The sheets on the beds were a dirty white, with pillows that matched. An old holovision sat at the foot of the single twin bed, flickering often when in use. There was a chair by the window, facing the door at the opposite end of the room. A gruff middle-aged man sat in it, and he was listening to a very distraught woman five years his junior. She was yelling at him.

“You’re a sorry excuse for a human being, you know that?”

“Well, I don’t have any excuses for that, at least.” William Doman said. He smiled, “Life’s a lot better when you’ve come to terms with who you are.”

Katherine Landy looked away in disgust.

William laughed to himself. Even after an hour, this philosophy professor really had no idea what he was about. She’s lucky she’s gorgeous, he thought. Most people would be dead by now.

“So are you over it yet?” he asked. “I’d really like to have some, uh, ‘civilized conversation’ with a philosophy professor.” William knew he needed to exorcise the issue some more. “Never done that before.”

Katherine looked incredulous. “Over it?” she said in a small voice. Her mouth kept the shape of an O. “OVER IT? You bastard, people don’t just get over seeing four colleagues shot dead, and then being kidnapped by the son-of-a-bitch who did it! People don’t just get over the prick then making them help him get away. Then don’t just get over following his directions as they drive for an hour. They don’t get over it while they’re still in a motel room with him right now! I don’t get over that kind of thing very quickly. ” She waived at the bland motel room around them. At least it was clean, William thought. “Yeah, I’m going to get over that real fucking fast. That makes perfect sense.” She seemed subdued for the moment.

Time to prod a little more, William thought. “Well, look at the bright side.” He said with a smile. “A. You’re still breathing. B. It’s not like I raped you or anything.”

She was even more aghast. “You didn’t rape me? I should be fucking loving life right now because you didn’t rape me? You’re a fucking ANIMAL!” She was truly irate and tried to compose herself. “You kill my friends, kidnap me, threaten me non-stop, then when I’m scared as hell, you expect me to get over it and have a civilized conversation with you…”she seemed to have lost a little momentum, as William stared at her, watching and listening as if she were providing fascinating conversation already.

Minutes passed by. The philosophy professor broke the silence. “So,” she said, trying to sound composed, “why am I not dead or raped?”

William smiled again. This was a breakthrough. “Because you’re beautiful.” He paused as she looked at him, mouth open. “I don’t like killing beautiful women if I can help it”, he added, as if to clarify.

If it was possible, William thought Katherine looked even more shocked. She said slowly, even a little sarcastically, “So I can thank my blond hair, blue eyes, and the push-up bra I wore today for my life?”

“Not to mention you seem to take care of yourself and have naturally great legs.” He shrugged. ”But yeah, basically.” The blond hair and blue eyes really didn’t matter to him. He had black hair and green eyes, the last woman he had slept with had red hair and brown eyes. It didn’t matter. How much a person cared about their appearance and what they did about it was much more important, he thought.

Katherine snorted. Seeing no further explanation was forthcoming, she pushed on. “So you didn’t kill me because you think I’m beautiful. Yet you didn’t want to rape me.”

William’s smile vanished. He’d been expecting the conversation to go here, but it still hurt. People didn’t get it. “What makes you think I’m capable of raping a woman?”

Katherine actually laughed. “I don’t know, maybe it’s the utter lack of morals? Perhaps it’s the ability to kill people and not care about it? Hell, if you can kill I’d think rape would be like nothing.”

William was silent. He looked pensive. Ten seconds went by. “As a woman, I can hardly believe you’d say that.” More silence. “Have you ever seen a woman get raped?”

Katherine was a little angry as this assault. “I’ve seen four people take a blaster in the chest, and that wasn’t too fucking pleasant.”

William continued to stare. “You say what you mean, don’t you?” He laughed, then composed himself and continued. “The two things are completely different.” He paused again, this time for effect. “How many people are on this world? A billion?”

The professor didn’t see where this was going. She shrugged. “Thereabouts.”

“Well I’m sure hundreds die every day. Four more die, and you expect me to really have a hard time with that? Does it really matter?”

Katherine Landy was outraged. “Does it MATTER?! I KNEW THEM. YES IT FUCKING MATTERS. And to you too, because you killed them, you prick. You amaze me.” Outrage had turned to disgust.

“I didn’t even know them. I may as well have not pulled the trigger as far as I’m concerned.” He stopped and looked out the window. “Killing someone with a blaster is a lot less intimate than raping a woman. If you’re having sex with someone, you’re involved with them automatically.” Again he looked around. “I guess if you kill someone you know that’s one thing, but what I did… I have no problem with that. It’s not even a speck in the big picture.” He leaned back.

“There is no big picture you imbecile!” seethed Katherine. “The big picture is something logical nerds made up because they don’t have what really matters in the world: Personal relationships.” She paused, then added “Apparently sociopaths look at the world that way too. I hadn’t met any before today.”

Being called a sociopath had no effect on the hitman. “The big picture is what really matters. Humanity is what really matters.” William was getting civilized conversation. He was surprised.

“To who? Matters to who? Do you really think anything you do affects humanity?” She laughed. “By your own philosophy, you have never done anything at all that matters.”

William furrowed his eye brows momentarily, and then went back on the offensive. “You still haven’t told me why I should care about the bodies in the hotel.”

“They were people. You didn’t know them, but someone did. You altered the lives of fifty, maybe one-hundred people. That doesn’t matter?”

“By your own philosophy, personal relationships are all that should matter.” He smiled. “I don’t need to know someone to kill them.”

Katherine looked exasperated. “You’re part of the human race. That’s a relationship.”

“That sounds a lot like the big picture to me.”

Shaking her head, the professor changed the subject. “So, what’s your next move?”

He flashed another grin. “Well,” the hitman said, “I’m waiting on a fake for you. Then you’re coming with me to the starport and getting off the planet.”

She was sputtering. “What makes you think I will-“

“In exchange”, William interjected forcefully,” for accepting a ticket to wherever you wish to go, and some money to get you started, I’ll agree not to kill you.”

Katherine paused in silence. “If I refused and you were going to kill me anyway, would you rape me first?”

William cocked an eyebrow. “Is that an invitation?”

“That’s a fucking insult you filthy animal.”

William laughed. Maybe subconsciously he did want to have sex with her. After a moment, he asked, “So, where are you going to go?”

“Right now, Hell sounds like an improvement.”

“That’s an insult, not an invitation, correct?”

Katherine glowered.

The starport was as crowded as ever. The towers at the entrance gleamed in the sunlight. The complex was huge, spanning several miles in either direction. It had to be, since it serviced the entire planet. Vendors were everywhere, yelling to attract attention to their stands. William and Katherine walked into the fracas, ignoring a vendor desperate to sell skin lotion.

William had done his usual job on the disguises. First he had made Katherine slim her eye brows up a bit, as well as wearing some fake teeth to give her jaw a different look. He then had her tuck up her hair, on which she wore a large white hat. He guessed the hat was for sunlight protection, but it did a great job of blocking her face from anyone who wasn’t trying to see what she looked like. For himself he had shaved his usual beard and powdered his hair a bit. Along with glasses, he looked a different man.

As they walked William thought of how desperately he wanted to get off the planet. The place was so boring, like many other planets. It was really remarkably uninteresting, he thought. He wondered what the suicide rate was. Polsera would definitely be his next stop. Dancing every night for a week sounded like a good remedy for his stint on Selime.

“Hey, I’m going to use the restroom, if that’s ok with you.”

Katherine’s words jolted him back to reality. He had gotten complacent for a moment, and needed it to not happen again.

“Yeah, go ahead. If you stay in there too long there’s going to be serious problems though.”

She grunted and went in.

Several minutes passed. William went to a nearby stand to buy a news holo. A man waiting for his wife looked perfectly normal reading a news holo, and that way he could find out how far the police had gotten.

Police! He’d been stupid to let her get private time in that bathroom. She had probably called in already. He looked around. Nothing yet, anyway.

He put the holo under his arm and went to the nearest ticket desk. “When’s the next ship to Luxor?” he asked.

“You in a hurry?”

He jumped. His white-hat beauty had come back. And now she’d be able to tell authorities where he was headed. She sounded much more cheerful than twenty minutes ago too.

“Sir, if you want to run a ship leaves for Luxor in twenty minutes.”

William thought momentarily. “Great, give me two tickets. Here’s the IDs, and the money.” He tossed both an old fake of his and that of the last woman he had refused to kill. She’d had red hair.

The clerk didn’t notice. “You’re all set. Have a nice trip Mr. Reis.”

William took Katherine by the arm and half dragged her as he started for the gate.

“What’s this about? I thought I was going to Rico!” she complained. She was a lot less happy than five minutes ago.

William fumed. “And the cops probably think that too, don’t they?”

“Cops?” she asked quizzically. “Oh, you think I called them on a mobile while I was in the bathroom. “ She laughed. “Like anyone actually trusts the police on Selime.”

Trust the police. Only criminals don’t trust the police in a world like Selime, William thought. He looked around the Luxor gate. People were getting in line to board. Enough confusion.

Like a predator, he quickly reached over to Katherine’s neck, found the spot, and pushed hard with two fingers. He used the other hand to cover her mouth, though no scream had come out. After easing her down into a waiting chair and sitting next to her, he lifted her hat. As he expected, Katherine had switched clothes with another woman, who he presumed was a police officer. Maybe the officer thought she could play this better than Katherine.

That was her problem, William thought, as he inserted the poison-carrying syringe into the woman’s thigh. He removed his glasses and put them on his latest kill. He then got up, white hat in hand. She definitely could be sleeping, he thought. Folding up the hat, he deposited it into an incinerator before boarding the ship for Luxor.

And from Luxor to Polsera, William thought. Polsera was going to be a hell of a time.